Swearing at fruit

With all this time on my hands, it is a little shameful that I haven't done more.

In a little corner of Surrey there is a disparate collection of interconnected characters all waiting for me to tell them what to do next, but I don't even know what I am going to do next, so they will have to be patient. Living day to day and hand to mouth does not put you in the best position to influence the lives of others except by example.

I am one of those people who regularly swear at inanimate objects. I inwardly laugh at myself when I do, but that doesn't mean that the curses are not deep and heart-felt. I have just eaten half a grapefruit and found myself telling it to 'fuck off' when a segment refused to detach itself from the central pith stem.

A friend of mine had an upstairs neighbour who tended to be a little on the unstable - not to say volatile -  side. He eventually died in a late-night police car chase, but when I knew him he was very polite and respectful to me, despite admitting that he bought his old Sierra to use as a battering ram in situations such as the one which killed him. The car was tougher than he was, it turned out.

One day he invited his neighbour - also a friend of mine - into his flat for a cup of tea. Chatting, he reached into a wall cupboard for the ingredients and then closed its door. The door slowly swung open, so he close it again - this time a tad more forcefully than the first.

He put the cups down on the table and turned around to see that the cupboard door had swung open again, so he reached up and slammed it shut hard, causing it to bounce back open rather than drift into that position.

In an instant he had lost it and began slamming it closed again and again, each time with a little more force and each time with a louder curse. In a very short while the whole cupboard ended up as matchwood mixed with broken crockery on the floor with him jumping up and down on the pieces, swearing at the top of his voice and calling it every obscene and insulting name in his vocabulary.

That cupboard had it coming.